Hi, I am a motorcyclist and I see 4 improvements you could do for riders. Some of them are maybe Waze/Android issue, I do not know if it is technically possible, but it would be very practical
1) we drive on open air, with a mount. When it is sunny, we wear shades so it is quite difficult to read the screen (shades+transparent protection). We have to set the luminosity to the max (drains the battery like hell) and sometimes it is not enough. I often get -30% battery for a 40 min ride. I suggest you propose an optional "high contrast" mode for riders. For instance black, white and grey, to copy LCD display. Optionel night mode (black background, white arrow) even in daytime would help save the battery. It would make our life easier and the drive safer also
2) very often, I know the general way to my destination like 80% but I need Waze to guide me on the 20% remaining steps. If I set Waze to my destination, put my phone in the mount as I start, then start riding, it will drain the battery for nothing because I already know most of the way. If I put my phone to sleep, I ride, then I have to stop when I am getting close to my destination, take off my gloves, take the phone out, activate it, put it back, put gloves back, then drive. Its a waste of time. So my suggestion is : there should be an automatic "wake my phone/wake Maps from sleeping" when I am getting close to my destination. I could parameter that, when I am in radius 1km or 20km to my arrival, the phone should come back to life. We riders have our hands busy while we ride, like totally busy.
3) when I am riding, I do not want to be bothered by messages from other apps. Sometimes messages come blocking my view at critical points. Also I do not need, while I am riding, that my phones checks the data of all my apps. On a mount, under the sun, a phone tends to get very hot so I would like to be able to set my phone to only focus on Waze and anything else would be dismissed.
4) because of the afore mentioned problems, I sometimes use a bluetooth headphone. I set the destination, activate the headphone, put my phone to sleep, then ride, guided by the voice. It saves my battery and prevents the phone from getting too hot. The slight problem of this system is that sometimes, for long periods of time, I have no audio feedback if my phone/Waze is still active. If I could have a voice message, lets say every 5 min if there is no direction change, that "continue, you are on the right way", it would made me feel more secure

Allow me to choose the dark theme as the always used UX theme / skin.

Default map should be NIGHT and then change to day when it confirms ambient light level is high otherwise one gets a flash of day mode in the night.

Please ,YES!
The cutesy pastel colors during day mode are not even close to contrast enough for the icons and text to be readable without the phone in your face.
If this app is expected to be used by a driver, then everything must be recognizable at a glance. We don't want eyes down for longer than a split second.
And the pop-up messages need to be bigger, but go away when I acknowledge them without touching the screen.